Burnout, PTSD, and high turnover are also hallmarks of suicide hotline operators. The difference? The reputable hotlines care a lot more about their employees'

Burnout, PTSD, and high turnover are also hallmarks of suicide hotline operators. The difference? The reputable hotlines care a lot more about their employees' mental health, with mandatory breaks, free counseling, full healthcare benefits (including provisions for preventative mental health care like talk therapy). Another important difference is that suicide hotlines are decoupled from the profit motive. As more and more users sign up to use a social network, it gets more profitable and more and more load needs to be borne by the human moderation team. But suicide and mental health risk is (roughly) constant (or slowly increasing with societal trends, not product trends). There's also less of an incentive to minimize human moderation cost. In large companies, some directors view mod teams as a cost center that takes away from other ventures. In an organization dedicated only to suicide hotline response, a large share of the income (typically fundraising or donations) goes directly into the service itself.